Mark Zuckerberg Tweet About Nigeria is Fabricated
The Claim
Mark Zuckerberg tweets saying Nigeria’s Minister of Information needs to have a medical checkup.
News posted on
Emerging story
A viral tweet making the rounds on social media from the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter handle says Nigeria’s Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed ought to go for a medical checkup. The tweet garnered over 2.6 million retweets and 3.7 million likes since 4th June when it was posted.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar can authoritatively confirm that Mark Zuckerberg did not send the viral tweet or handle his. Twitter has blocked the handle, which appears authentic with Twitter’s blue tick verification badge.
Misbar’s investigation reveals that Zuckerberg’s authentic Twitter handle is @finkd, as confirmed by BusinessInsider. However, the account, which has over 480k followers, is yet verified by the social media giant. This is most likely because he isn’t engaging the account often, a strong metric Twitter looks out for when verifying an account. The Facebook CEO last tweeted on Jan 18, 2012.
He, however, is quite active on Facebook, which he co-founded in 2004 with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, Eduardo Saverin, and Andrew McCollum.
Zuckerberg's Facebook page, followed by over 116 million people, is quite active as he updates Facebook projects. His last post, published on June 7th, has amassed over 200k likes, 9.2k shares, and 37k comments.
